Despite my
main interest being the period between World Wars One and Two, I’ve been getting
increasingly interested in the Victorian Era.
There’s always been a bit: I love watching adaptations of Dickens,
Gaskell, Burnett; The Forsyte Sage is one of my favorite miniseries and books (not written in the period, but the first two parts take place during it);
I loved The Young Victoria. After
Christmas I picked up three or four books on Victoria and the Era, and I’m
working through one of them currently.
In the book, the author takes you through a day in the life of a
Victorian, covering different classes and different years in the period. There is a lengthy discussion of changes in
fashion and the new colors that were created at this time due to the discovery
of chemical dyes.
Dyeing
clothes has been around for millennia.
Dyes were made from plants and animals.
The first popular fabric dye was a purple made from crushed mollusk shells;
it was the most expensive dye ever, literally costing its weight in gold. By about the year 300, instead of things that
actually made purple, people were using blue and red to make purple; this was
more affordable, and, well, the mollusk had gone extinct. Late in the fourth century, the Emperor of
Byzantium issued a decree that only the imperial family could wear purple. You could be killed if you went against the
decree.
The next
popular dye was red. In Europe, madder
root was used to make red. In South
America, Brazilwood was used for a brighter red. In Central America, cochineal, an insect, was
used. In the fifteenth century, “Cardinal’s
Purple” was used for the clergy, but was actually a crimson red made from a
different insect related to cochineal; cochineal was brought back to Europe around
1519. In the seventeenth century, it was
found that adding tin to this made for a deeper, more intense red; this was
used for the British Army’s coats and for those bright red hunting jackets you
see.
Now we’re
finally caught up to where dyes were at coming into the Victorian Era.
In the
1850s, William Henry Perkins was trying to cure malaria by creating artificial
quinine. In the process, Perkins
discovered aniline dyes. Aniline dyes
were “a byproduct created from distilling tar left from coal that was ‘cooked’
to produce gas for commercial use” (1).
Perkins created the “first mass produced chemical dye” (2) – mauveine. At first Perkins called it Tyrian Purple
after the Roman purple, but since this was a real thing, that name was
dropped. Next the color was called
mauve, after a flower, but personally Perkins called it mauveine. (This mauveine is a different shade than
modern mauves, so that’s why that name is still used. (3))
Mauveine wasn’t
the first aniline dye - the first dyes from coal tar were blues and reds - but Perkins
was the first to really pursue aniline dyes.
There were issues at the beginning: the earliest mauveine dyes weren’t
very colorfast, fading in the sun; they couldn’t dye cotton - the most popular
fabric at the time - only wool and silk; creating aniline dyes was incredibly
expensive. Perkins experimented though
and found that tannins (the same things found in wines and whatnot) helped the
dye work on cotton. He also found a way to
produce the dyes much more cheaply; he found his own dyer and built his own
factory. (4)
Around this
same time, the Empress Eugenie decided she really loved wearing purple. In 1858, Queen Victoria wore a pale purple to
her daughter’s wedding. Purples, of all
shades, were on the rise. In 1859, Punch magazine was joking about the “mauve
measles”. After mauve went out of fashion,
there were reds, browns, other purples, yellows, blues, and greens. Perkins kept up with the changing fashions,
coming up with new colors: dahlia, Britania violet (a deep blue), Perkin’s
green, aniline black, and others (5).
Aniline
dyes were very popular. Many of the
colors were bright (though not all were; aniline blacks were incredibly
popular) and the new dyes didn’t fade in the sun or rinse out in the wash. Natural dyes were more pale, and would fade
or wash out over time; the market for natural dyes just collapsed.
Aniline dyes also were safer than
some of the older dyes. As mentioned with
purples, greens could only be made by mixing blues and yellows until the late
1700s. In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele
created a bright, colorfast green by mixing copper and arsenic. Scheele’s Green was used for everything from
wallpaper and paintings to clothing. It
looked good in natural light and the new gas lighting. It was used for the fake flowers that were so
popular. It was everywhere. It could also be dangerous; it did have
arsenic in it after all. Aniline greens
took over from the arsenic dyed greens in the 1870s.
(Honestly though, these arsenic
dyes weren’t as dangerous as they’ve been made out to be - especially not the
greens. The most dangerous arsenic dyes
were red and black, and possibly blue.
Green got the bad rap probably mostly from the fake flowers it was used
on. Unless you had very sensitive skin,
or allergies to the metals in them, fabric dyes probably wouldn’t really hurt
you. The people that suffered the most
from arsenic dyes were the people that created the dyes and the dyed
items. The worries about arsenic dyes
were more likely about “Victorian morality and condemnation of fashion and
female vanity” than anything else (6).)
By the late nineteenth century
nearly all colors could be created with aniline dyes. Not everyone approved of chemical dyes
though. By 1900, the Shah of Persia had
even banned the dyes from being used in making rugs. If someone did make a rug with chemical dyes,
the carpets were taken and the guilty party was fined at double the value and possibly
even burned in public. Aniline dyes
helped pave the way for modern dyes.
So that’s a
brief telling of the evolution of fabric dyes, and Victorian chemical
dyes. I didn’t find quite as much as I
would have liked (I do have a whole book about the creation of mauve, but I
haven’t read it yet, and that’s still limited in scope), but I found it pretty
interesting. Besides, those pretty,
crazy colors!
Magenta
ReplyDeleteAn aniline dye created after the British victory at Magenta